Sandy and the Rise of Extreme Weather

This week, Manhattan, where the streets are often immaculate the day after the heaviest blizzard, became host to one of the most extreme storms ever to make landfall in the United States. As Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out in a recent post, Sandy fits a general pattern both in North America, and around the world, toward more extreme weather—a pattern which can partly be attributed to climate change. According to a recent study by the insurance firm Munich Re, Kolbert writes, the number of weather-related disasters in North America has quintupled over the last three decades.

The Munich Re report identifies global warming as one of the major culprits in the rise of extreme weather. The New Yorker has written several landmark articles on climate change and global warming over the years. In 1989, William McKibben wrote a sweeping piece, “The End of Nature,” about the impact of the greenhouse effect and the rise of extreme weather around the globe. Elevated carbon dioxide levels, McKibben writes, can have a staggering effect. Hurricanes draw their strength from heat transferred to the atmosphere when ocean water evaporates. Thus, the warmer the ocean’s surface, the more powerful the hurricane. Just a rise of three or four degrees in tropical sea-surface temperatures can raise the upper limit of hurricane strength, causing the “destructive potential” of a storm to grow between forty and fifty per cent. In fact, as Kolbert points out in her post, one of the forces which fuelled Sandy is the much-higher-than-average sea temperature along the East Coast.

Kolbert explored the ramifications of climate change on weather patterns more fully in her three-part series, “Climate of Man,” which ran in the spring of 2005:

If current trends continue, atmospheric CO2 will reach five hundred parts per million—nearly double pre-industrial levels—around the middle of the century. It is believed that the last time CO2 concentrations were that high was during the period known as the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. In the Eocene, crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today.

Manhattan, of course, is not exempt from these trends. In a 1977 Our Local Correspondents, Eugene Kinkead surveyed the range of extreme weather conditions which had already buffeted the city—or were likely to do so. One of the only major hurricanes to directly hit regions that are now a part of New York City was the 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane. On September 3rd, Kinkead explains, the storm’s center “hurtled ashore where Kennedy Airport now stands,” then continued across eastern Queens and western Nassau Counties.

In Manhattan, less than two miles from the hurricane’s center, buildings were unroofed, trees were toppled, and chimneys were blown down. Bricks, slate tiles, and glass flying through the air made walking in the streets as perilous as crossing a battlefield. All wharves on the North River were damaged, and only one or two on the East River escaped serious harm.

Hardest hit, Kinkead writes, was the Battery in lower Manhattan. “The low atmospheric pressure of the hurricane seemed to lift the waters of Upper New York Bay over the seawall which guarded it. The force of the hurricane waters “swept over the masonry,” he writes, and eroded the Battery’s earth some sixty feet back from the bay.

Twenty-three years later, in a prescient Talk of the Town piece, published in October of 2000, John Seabrook explored what would happen to Manhattan in the event of a major hurricane. The city, he wrote, has long been in the grip of “hurricane denial,” brought on by a sense of invulnerability due to the rare occurrence of truly incapacitating storms. But New York, he asserted, is uniquely vulnerable to a certain kind of hurricane. In the early nineties, he writes, the Army Corps of Engineers asked a number of hydraulic specialists to measure the “bathymetry,” or topography, of the underwater shelf around which the city is built. When the data was fed into a computer program known as SLOSH (for Sea, Lake, and Overland Surge from Hurricanes), it showed that the city had “a much greater potential for surge-related disaster than officials had previously suspected.” Big winds, the study predicted, would shut down bridges and major airports. If the storm struck the New Jersey coastline above Atlantic City, Seabrook writes, its east edge could push the storm surge right up into New York Harbor, causing most of the entryways to the office towers in lower Manhattan to be completely submerged. The effects would be truly devastating. Seabrook’s piece ran around the same time that the Bush Administration was pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol accords on greenhouse gases. As Seabrook notes, most New Yorkers at the time found it “hard to credit” the idea that the city would ever be crippled by a hurricane of any kind.

It can be easy, living within our sophisticated urban sprawl, to feel impregnable, immune to the extreme conditions which all too often buffet the other areas of the globe. But as McKibben writes in his 1989 piece, the most destructive thing about climate change is its very unpredictability. The certainty of nature, and its “deep, constant rhythms,” is what has historically freed us to be fully human, to focus on the art of living rather than simply surviving. Even harsh environs around the world have traditionally been harsh in a predictable way. Global warming has replaced our old, traditional nature, he writes, with a “new nature of our own making.” This new nature won’t be predictably anything, and it may take us a very long time to understand our relationship with it. It’s this interminable uncertainty that is the first cataclysm of global warming, McKibben writes, and perhaps the most profound.